Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Long
before cant-spewing, History-challenged, feminist wannabe reviewers would erupt
into frothy rages over Rogue’s cleavage, the naked breasts of women were
believed to be symbols of power. Of female power. They could not be challenged,
diminished or polluted by the eyes of Man. They were revered. Associated with
fertility and growth, they were sometimes appropriated by male divinities, as
was the case with Hapi, the Egiptian Male God of the Nile. Responsible for the
vital annual overflow of the river Nile, his torso was adorned in statuary with
a pair of female breasts as a sign of fertility.The
image above, of a Minoan (Crete) snake goddess, or snake priestess, of about
1600 b.C., distinguishes itself not only for the globular, shapely aggressive
naked breasts, but for the snakes she’s holding in each hand. Usually
considered to be communicators with the powers below the earth the snakes –
obviously so in Western Culture, after the Judeo-Christian tradition – snakes are
also clear phallic markers. The goddess (or priestess, as Art Historians seem
not to reach a unanimous conclusion as to the true meaning of the statues), in
its conjugation of exuberant breasts and control over symbolic phalluses,
appears to be overly dominant, exuding power, confidence and determination,
prefiguring in its ancient solemnity, not only the modern day superheroines,
but the modern day action women as well. Female body and female power are not
and need not be separate realms, something that has not yet been realized by
infantile feminists that keep crying out not only for total de-eroticization of
art (including its modern popular expression in comics and films), but for its
de-sexualization by the erasure of representation of all secondary sexual
characteristics. When sex is viewed as a threat, mental disturbance is not very
far away.The
images of the Minoan Snake Goddesses are aggressively erotic, Dionysian in its
exuberance, rich in its meaning, visionary in its power. Marked as truly feminine
by the naked breasts, the priestess, the goddess, holds absolute control over
the penis, its pagan power traversing History, Art and Culture unchallenged,
until being embodied in the new pagan goddesses of Porn:

In
discussing the Minoan Snake Godesses in her book The History of the Breast,
Marilyn Yalom writes “(…) the Cretan
statues with their prominent breasts and snakes may also be saying: ‘Take care
not to offend this priestess. She can just as easily dispense poison as milk!’.”
The snakes are therefore, not only
symbolic phalluses, but also symbolic guns, capable of spewing death just like
today’s handguns:

The
Girls With Guns of today’s comics and films, are thus direct heirs of this
ancient lineage. Capable of dispensing both poison and milk, death and pleasure,
they are whole women, unafraid of Man, unapologetic of Sex. Feminist literature
not rarely refer to them as phallic women, as if interlopers from another
reign, intruders in the fortress of maleness from where they took the sleeping
men’s guns, just as Lorena Bobbitt did in both a more literal and more symbolic
way. But where Lorena’s absolute theft was a calculated act of media-savy and
cowardice, the true Warrior Women know that the penis is not the weapon of
their enemy, but as much their own. For they, and only they, control the
snakes.

The
snake and the breast are both undying signifiers of fertility, fecundity,
passion and generation. They visibly externalize such attributes through the
spewing of milky fluids. In ancient rituals of the Malabar, much as other
generative divinities, the serpent is worshiped by women with libations of milk
(see The
Sacred Fire: The Story of Sex in Religion, by B.Z. Goldberg), and just
as in almost every porn film the snakes ejaculate their visible pleasure all over
the altar of women’s breasts. Simultaneously Pollution and Libation, man and
woman meet in that melting moment of pleasure and desire. That explosive moment
when the gun is discharged but not necessarily fired.

Porn
actress Mya Diamond embodies and enacts this ancestral dynamic through which
the snake became the penis became the gun, in a scene from Xavi Dominguez’s
triple x-rated film SEX ANGELS 2
(2006), itself a sequel spoofing McG’s two-films update of the 70s TV series Charlie’s
Angels. The film, in its basic plot ploy, parodies the first season
episode “Target: Angels” (episode
six), in which our heroines are being separately targeted for assassination by
unknown parts.

Advised
by our ersatz Charlie of the imminent threat, the three angels start sharing
the recent attempts on their lives, usually after a fairly graphic sex scene.
Through flashback, we learn that Mya was visiting a private wife swapping club
in search of a good time, recalling to mind the female type of pre-code Hollywood
defined by Molly Haskell in her pioneer study “From Reverence to Rape”,
a type “conceived of as having sexual
desire without being freaks, villains, or even necessarily Europeans (…). Women
(…) entitled to initiate sexual encounters, to pursue men, even to embody
certain “male” characteristics without being stigmatized as “unfeminine” or
“predatory.”

Once
there, garbed in jewels and satiny red dress, she is accosted by two customers,
with whom she proceeds to share the most vigorous and strenuous ménage à trois, making the screen sizzle
with the most complete and vivid catalogue of sex acts one could expect from
such a film. They fuck. Yes, they fuck her breasts, and they fuck her mouth,
and they double-team her, and she consents to be doubly-penetrated. All the
while she controls the action. We never doubt that she is the one commanding
the puppets, the one at the wheel, even as she masturbates a penis while she is
fellating the other, her hair captive of one of their hands.In the end, they both ejaculate copiously
over her breasts, her hands controlling the snakes as they spill their poison.

Unbeknownst
to her, but – one suspects – not to the viewer, they are the assassins sent to
terminate her. And, as soon as their orgasms are over, their penises deflating
in pointed contrast to their trusty forty-fives, they point their guns at her,
naked and feminine and covered in sperm.

And
yet, with their primal lusts satiated, with no territorial quandary to resolve,
the reasons for violence and aggression appear to have vanished. Only the
iconoclast, fueled by the Sadean impulses of pollution and corruption, would
desecrate the idol whose cult he has just observed. The victim – and how often
anti-sex feminist rhetoric can think of the (hetero)sexually active woman in no
other terms – has transcended herself in this sacred game, regaining the power
of the Snake Goddess.

“I
can’t kill her now”, one of them says. You could think that’s because she’s
marked territory now, his semen like dog-piss on a lamppost. That because his
lust is satisfied, so is his need for violence, for we all know that sex is
violence, that sex is rape. But that is not so. He can’t kill her because she
has the power over the weapons. The snakes have discharged their venom and are
lying limp and flaccid as if in deep winter. Only she can bring life back to
them.

And
so, imperious, capricious, sublime, the Goddess regains the upper hand and
shoots both of them with her own concealed weapons, their materialization
looking for all purposes like an act of magic, for surely she couldn’t have
hidden those two semiautomatics on her flimsy dress…

Despite
marred by the overextended and mainly under-imaginative sex scenes so
characteristic of recent porn, and not in the least aided by the paper-thin
excuse of a plot, in this particular scene SEX
ANGELS 2 accidentally (maybe not so much by accident as by design) dips in
the subterranean pool of our cultural history and drinks deeply of the hidden
undercurrents of sex, sex roles and sexual representations at the margins of popular
entertainment. And what it brings back from the deep, is not objectifying or
degrading for women, it is empowering and liberating. After all, it’s only the
sex differences that make women, women. Even when they’re Goddesses.

VIEWER BEWARE

The content of this blog may be offensive for non-mature readers, feminists, school-teachers, PoMo pseudo-thinkers and whomever may believe smut can't be a relevant art form. Some of the images displayed therein may arouse this blog's reader's libido and prompt younger viewers to seek the joys of the opposite sex.